News and news reporting critique from the voice of the DreamC Network.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Finance: Living Stipend Encourages Work, Not Laziness

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If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish,
he eats for life. Anonymous

If you build a
robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?Scott Santens

The concept is taken out of so many borderline-prophetic science-fiction novels: pay the population a living stipend, just enough to cover their daily basic needs.

If you pay someone just to live, the critics ask, won't that encourage a lazy workforce?

Not so. According to Guy Standing from the University of London, "When people stop working out of fear, they become more productive."

While I'm glad to hear someone it working on
the problem, and with what seems like a decent head on their shoulders, I
feel like starting in the US is a bad idea. It's not so much the people
as it is the size of the country. The solution (and the problem) may
not be easily scalable (or scalable at all).

Even
if it were done to satisfaction in England, which scales to about the
size of the state of Illinois, I think it would be easier for Americans
to start thinking "Yeah, maybe we could do that too." England is also a
primarily English-speaking country, which also aids in translation-free
cross-communication and sharing of ideas.